Sunday, September 11, 2022

Linguistic change in our lifetime.

I was reading Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" the other week, and at one point he says "edibles" to mean food in general.

Except, for us now, that word only means like marijuana gummies and shit like that.

It's totally like how the word "deer" used to mean different kind of animals, but now it only means "deer," and how like in German "das Gift" used to mean "present" or "gift" like in English, only now it means "poison" ("the thing given," in an ominous sense).

It's funny to take a step back and see how quickly such a very specific semantic narrowing occurred, and from such a general word, and without us even realizing it.

When you read about stuff like that in linguistics textbooks, you're always like, "Okay, so I can understand how that happened, but that was then, and this is now," only it isn't.

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